CSM - counting feathers

Also as part of the Children's Book Illustration - II course at CSM, we had to create a short counting sequence aimed at very young children. We were using inks and liquid watercolours. The vibrancy of the colours automatically made me think of birds.

Central St Martin's Children's Illustration Course

I recently did the short course in Children's Book Illustration II - Advanced at Central Saint Martin's, taught by artist and illustrator April Wilson. I've done the earlier course (Children's Book Illustration I) some time before and I would really recommend both. The courses cover a variety of things, such as different media, facial expressions, story-boarding etc.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be adding some of the work I did as part of the course - please bear in mind most of these pictures would have been done during class-times and are generally pretty quick, rough sketches, not finished pieces of art by any means.

So to kick things off - These images were part of an exercise on facial expressions. We made a very basic sock puppet then made it make different facial expressions which we drew - simple.

We then developed these into a short sequence - this is mine

A bit more slithery snailness

I had fun doing the Slither picture for Illustration Friday, so I did another.

Slither

This week's Illustration Friday topic is 'Slither' and you can't get much more slithery than a snail slithering across your nose.
This is done in watercolour.

Eat for survival

Submitted to Illustration Friday for 'Rescue' as I think the little girl and the cat could really do with rescuing here

Sketch done in Gouache paint and pencil

We are sailing

Something slightly different here - My sister commissioned me to do this piece. It's pretty much all Photoshop and not quite my usual style, but I found it quite interesting to do and picked up a couple of things along the way.

Fractual Disturbances

This is a really old piece I came across tonight when sorting a few things. It was to illustrate a poem written by a friend entitled 'Fractural Disturbances'. Sadly I no longer have the poem though. It's a really simply, mostly vector illustration. Pity about the tree on the LHS.

Let sleeping dogs lie

This is a bit of further character development of the dog on the beach. Rather than the happy, running chappy seen earlier here he is in his 'home' of a cardboard box in an alley. Caran D'ache Neocolour II crayons and various inks on brown wrapping paper. (There's a more developed version which I'll post soon)